Trafalgar
Ya....this is IMHO what you get when you have the (I believe) intentional failure to recognize your process as hours based vs. days based. From a Company perspective, you want to maximize the productive hours and don’t particularly care (within FTL) how many days off this generates (in fact, our COS/CAs/CBAs were driven somewhat with this in mind—what seems like a lot of days off actually is due to the 900 hour a year limit and not particularly from an industrial perspective).
Extra time on a string (whether that’s EXBs on the road, Reserve, Availablity, etc.) by definition is costing you money you don’t want to pay and represents an inefficiency of SOME sort in how you are doing business. Now you may (as a company) view that as a necessary expense, but it’s an expense nonetheless. And absolutely NOTHING in life is “free” (in fact, some of the most expensive things IN life are touted as ‘free’ — the person mistakenly believing them TO be free just hasn’t figured it out yet). You also get collateral costs of paying for lodging and allowance, etc. which can become significant.
The ‘win-win’ is to write a stable hours based roster that maximizes your flying time and minimizes time on a string (taking into account variables like sickness, historic issues with weather, etc.). This will include SOME reserve, but it needs to be REAL reserve (i.e. provided by an asset that isn’t otherwise tagged for duty somewhere—if this reserve is prior to a trip it’s not really reserve in that that person will fly the same hours as whatever trip you’ve pulled him or her off of—you’ve just built something that sets yourself up for failure by collapsing your own roster and generating MORE work and less efficiency for everyone—which will include FTL timeouts, sitting, and excessive overtime). So what you think is increased flexibility or availability is simply a built in logic bomb that when used goes off to destroy your schedule.
AND you’re dealing with an operation that crosses a whole hell of a lot of time zones in which your operators have a duty to the regulatory authority and their license (not YOU) not to fly unfit.
SO, your ‘plan’ for keeping people on a string craters as folks simply use (fully paid) sick leave days that they never used before. You really can’t do much about this without breaking some law somewhere (especially in ‘first world’ labor nations) and you’re stuck. Your roster continues to plod along in continuous chaos at high cost and low productivity. The way things are structured there really isn’t much incentive to show up for work and you’re in “Office Space” land with folks doing the minimum. C scale results for C scale pay and so forth.
The solution is an incentive based hours based process which maximizes productive hours flown as well as time not on a string. Maximum hours at minimum cost. As well as developing a strong allegiance toward “Team Cathay” and being a valued member of an outstanding organization.
Last edited by Shep69; 21st Nov 2017 at 14:57.